by D. R. Perry
"I am?"
"Yeah. I mean that in a good way." She peered at the wall above the door, which was carved into a circle with hands and numbers, making a clock. "Anyway, we've got to go to that assembly."
"You're right." I stood, my knees crackling like a bowl of cereal recently introduced to milk. "My brother Noah thought I should wear something fancier."
"You go ahead and put on the dog if you want." Grace flopped back on the bed, throwing her arm over her eyes. "I'm strictly a flannel and jeans kind of gal."
"I totally understand."
Even though Grace practically copied my wardrobe manifesto, I couldn't follow it with her, not with the way I’d embarrassed my brother earlier. Grace unpacked as I put on the outfit Noah had selected this morning for the assembly. And I noticed something.
Grace Dubois didn't seem to own anything but well-worn or threadbare garments.
I’d complained about bringing too much stuff. My roommate seemed to have nothing.
Talk about a disparity.
I had to learn a ton from Grace and quickly because the only way to befriend a person from an entirely different set of circumstances is to stop talking and listen.
Chapter Nine
Back down in the lobby, the space was full of chairs except for the far end, where a podium sat waiting for someone to step up and speak. Most of the seats were already taken, which meant Grace and I had to walk all the way down to the front.
Normally in academic settings where I had my pick, I chose the row and column closest to the instructor. Maybe I overachieved a little, which wasn't usually a bad thing with career goals in a medical profession.
Socially, it was a nightmare.
Once again, this was a totally abnormal situation. At any other school, I'd have been perfectly fine with the mean girl hating me, with sauntering in at the last minute, or with sitting in front like the big giant nerd I am. At every other school I'd attended, Izzy and Cadence were with me, and I didn't care what other people thought.
Noah was a whole different animal.
As I settled myself in the front and center chair, a fire grew in my belly, one intent on fueling itself with the idea that my discomfort and shame were Noah's fault.
It would have been easy to blame him. I closed my eyes, trying to banish that thought. It was cruel and went against the way my family always stuck together. Bile rose, and a sour taste coated the back of my tongue. I couldn’t do the right thing and let it go.
This wasn't garden-variety sibling rivalry, either.
Before I could process this any further or retreat to relative solitude somewhere to work things through, my escape plans were foiled by the start of the assembly.
A POP! along with the rush of displacing air blew my bangs off my forehead. Ember clung more tightly to my shoulder, and beside me, Grace gasped, holding Lune closer.
A chorus of whispered voices followed hers. I managed not to add mine, a testament to my anger and the herculean effort I’d made to hold it in.
A man stood at the podium. He didn't do anything so mundane as walk up to it. No, he used his space magic, something he was clearly proud of. A mirthful grin stretched across his round, dusky-skinned face, which was awfully smooth for a man my grandmother’s age. His buzz-cut hair was dark brown, without a hint of gray in it.
Headmaster Hawkins had a sense of humor, and even with the deluge of information from my family, nobody had bothered to tell me this. Or maybe this wasn’t Bubbe’s old classmate, after all.
"Welcome, students!" He chuckled. The resonant voice carried farther than it should have with mundane acoustics. He was using magic for that, too. "I hope the summer left you refreshed and ready to work hard this year."
"My middle name, practically." It was Dylan's voice, murmuring behind me.
"Some of you have been here and done this in previous years. You were expecting my father, but he went on sabbatical and has left the job to me." That explained why he was Dad’s age. He was new to the position that fall.
"I'll try going against the grain and be brief." Hawkins smiled, clearly having fun with this. "Welcome students, old and new. You'll get your room assignments at the pneumatic tubes if you haven't already. Your class schedules will appear on your dorm desks after lunch today, and once you have those, all first-years will report back here with them for an academic campus tour, guided by your homeroom instructors."
He stood, gripping both sides of the lectern atop the podium with solid hands. I wasn’t sure what he was doing at first but understood when he eventually made eye contact with me.
Not more magic. He locked gazes with each student, remembering us all individually. Headmaster Hawkins wanted to know us by sight even if he didn’t have all the names to go with the faces.
I felt the tension in the room ease. Most of it, anyway. When people calmed down, the ambient temperature lowered, and that was the sort of thing a fire magus noticed, especially when she hadn't managed to cool her own hot head.
When he locked gazes with me, it felt eternal, although not in any weird emo way like how it was with Ember in Bubbe's surgery. It felt more like this man saw everywhere I'd been and maybe even some of the places I might go someday. It should have been a profoundly unsettling experience, but it was more a minor annoyance. That might have been because I was still angry about Noah giving me the cold shoulder.
"Peep." The dragonet's tail caressed my cheek, cool and soothing.
"Thanks." I reached up and gave her flank a pat.
Hawkins and I continued staring through this entire exchange. It lasted until the empty chair across the aisle to my right creaked.
“Sorry I'm late." The voice was male and cracked slightly.
He was very late since the headmaster had already clapped his hands and waved us off, dismissing us. This kid had missed the entire assembly.
"You’ve heard me practice that speech a million times, Harold." Headmaster Hawkins sighed. "Just go and get your room assignment, okay?"
"All right, Dad."
"Did he just say ‘dad?’" Grace nudged me in the side.
"Yeah." I turned to look at the headmaster's kid.
Harold Hawkins had dark bronze skin and black hair, but otherwise looked very much like his father—stocky and solid. He was much shorter and on the pudgy side, maybe a year too young to be here. He had a long and furry critter curled up in his lap, and I'd seen one of them before, even though they're pretty rare in New England.
"Wow." I stood, taking three steps to cross the aisle and stop beside the boy. "Is that a Pharaoh’s Rat?"
"Yeah, her name's Ningirima, but you can call her Nin for short." His face paled as he stared up at Ember, including her in the conversation. "She's friendly, I promise."
He said that because Pharaoh’s Rats hunt dragons, the giant shape-shifting kind. And also dragonets if they’re hungry enough.
"This is Ember." I held my arm out, and she sauntered down slowly. "She's way more confident than I am, I promise."
"Okay. And you can call me Hal. Harold's what my folks call me." Hal smiled. His eyes cut to my left, where Grace peeked out from behind me. His entire face lit up. "Oh, wow. You're Grace Dubois. I read your essay!"
"My-my entrance essay?" She blinked. "Um, I thought that was supposed to be, you know, personal?"
"Yeah, and it was really something else." He grinned. "The way you described what it was like living in—"
"Okay, um, thanks and all." Grace's eyes widened, and I felt the waves of near panic coming off her. Her stomach audibly churned. "But—"
"Hey, I think maybe we’re all hungry," I interrupted. "I mean, Grace came an awful long way and probably missed breakfast, and I couldn’t eat much this morning—nerves and all. So, when do they start serving lunch?"
"Oh, not for another half-hour or so." Hal stood, Nin running up his arm to stretch out along his shoulders like a fur stole. He turned to Grace, making a slight bow. "And I'm sorry about before, going on like that.
I can get you a little something right now to make up for it. Do you like apples or bananas?"
"Um, either. Or both?" Grace blinked rapidly a few times.
"Half a moment." His brows furrowed. "Here you go."
A banana appeared in his left hand. A moment later, an apple rested in his right. Lune stood on his haunches and sniffed, his whiskers brushing against the back of Hal's right hand. Grace barked a surprised sound somewhere between alarm and laughter.
"Thanks, half-pint."
Just like that, Elanor sashayed by and snatched the banana out of Hal's hand. She giggled, peeling the fruit as she took a seat a few rows up, next to Noah.
"What the ever-living fu—" Grace’s nostrils flared.
"You've still got an apple." Hal extended it toward Grace.
"Thanks, buddy." She shook her head. "But that was bitchy. And you just brushed it off?"
"I'm the headmaster's son." Hal deflated a little. "I've got to be a good example, or families might decide to send their kids to some other school. Anyway, I like being kind. It’s practically a counterculture nowadays."
"There's a lot of pressure on some of us, for sure." I nodded. Hal and Grace were at least people I could understand. "Others, not so much." I gestured at Elanor.
She peeled the banana, making eyes at pretty much the entire room. Most of the boys stared, watching and waiting for her to eat it. A handful, including Hal and Elanor's brother Logan, averted their eyes. Even Noah looked on, though with an eye-rolling smirk.
I might have been a total newbie at flirting, dating, and the romantic side of socializing, but I'd been on the internet and watched television. Maybe the boys had some weird sex thing on the brain.
With a wolfish grin, Elanor turned the banana sideways and took an enormous bite out of it, cutting it neatly in half with her teeth. I should have figured she’d do that. Noah had told me a million times that she’s gay like him.
The watching boys immediately found something else to look at. Some of them even left the room. Grace rolled her eyes and took an extra-loud bite of her apple.
"She's not into boys," Dylan said as he approached our little cluster. "Heard her chatting up my manager earlier. I mean, she didn't get far because Kayla's twenty and doesn't want to lose her job over inappropriate relations with a student."
"So, you're saying she pulled that whole stunt just to freak everyone out?" Hal shook his head. "I don't get it."
"Probably only likes girls and doesn’t want boys bugging her all year." Grace shrugged, her stomach rumbling again. "Okay, obnoxious internal organ, I get it. You need more food." She made quick work of the apple.
"I won’t have Elanor’s problem," I mumbled, but somehow my three companions all heard me because they let out a chorus of sighs. Well, two of them did, at least.
Dylan blinked. Hal shook his head, a wry grin twisting his full lips. Grace snorted. Clearly, my new friends didn’t agree with my self-deprecation. Or they were being nice despite all the sarcasm. Or both. At any rate, I felt a bit better now.
"None of that innocent blinking, pal." I tilted my head to look up at Dylan. "You must have looked in a mirror recently."
"Peep!"
Everyone laughed. Nobody else in the room even noticed because all the students broke into clusters. Ours was the smallest, but at that moment, I didn't care. Bigger wasn’t always better. As I introduced Dylan to my two newer friends, I realized something.
The fire in my belly was banked. It wasn’t completely gone, but it was manageable now. All I needed to do was avoid another fight with Noah for the rest of the day, and it'd go away.
I hoped.
Chapter Ten
"So, you don't have a familiar yet, Dylan?" Hal dipped a piece of bread into his bowl of chicken soup.
"Nope. But don't tell anyone." He shrugged, twirling some noodles on a fork. "Mom wanted me to try bonding with one before I went stateside, but Dad disagreed. Said Customs was hard enough on a magus without bringing a familiar into the mix. By hard, he meant expensive. It's always money with him."
"What is it with your mother?" Grace arched an eyebrow, holding a double cheeseburger in both her hands.
"He's got a tiger mom." I waved a triangle of turkey on rye in his general direction. "That's what you said over the summer, right, Dylan?"
"Pretty much. She's hoping I'll get more interested in what she calls "actual medicine" instead of the extraveterinary kind." He rolled his eyes. "Dad doesn't care as long as it's something lucrative."
"Running this school is lucrative." Hal shook his head. "But I'd prefer not to do it when I’m older."
"Yeah, about that." I put my sandwich down, suddenly not so hungry. "Wasn't it supposed to be your grandfather and not your dad running things this year?"
"Sharp, Aliyah." Hal tapped his nose. "You're right. This is Dad's first year as headmaster and it’s super last-minute. I wasn't supposed to start courses here until next year, but so it goes."
"Why?" I leaned forward, listening intently.
"I'm not supposed to talk about it." He glanced up, down, and around.
"Isn't, um…" Grace swallowed the mouthful of burger she’d tried to talk around. "Isn't your dad worried he's not ready?"
"Well, some of the faculty are helping him a lot." He waved his crust of bread at a table of four adults, all wearing staff lanyards. "See that lady professor over there?"
We looked. She was the only woman at the table, with long ash-brown hair in cornrows, light brown skin, and blue eyes. She dressed unconventionally for an academic, sporting a touristy Salem t-shirt over a pair of leggings printed with lightning bolts.
"That's Doctor Susan DeBeer. She came all the way from South Africa to teach at this school. She's been here since right after the Big Reveal. I met her one time before today, but Dad had meetings with her all summer."
"What about that guy?" Dylan jerked his thumb at a slightly built man sitting alone.
That fellow looked to be about my grandma's age. He had more salt than pepper in the hair ringing his bald olive-tone pate. A pair of spectacles was perched on his nose, horn-rimmed in a color that matched the owlish creature perched on his shoulder.
"That's Professor Luciano. Grandpa hired him last year." Hal finished the last of his bread, then reached for another roll from the basket on the table. "He used to teach at Academe Magica in the Italian Alps."
"How stereotypical." Dylan rolled his eyes, leaning in and lowering his voice. "A magic-school professor with an owl familiar."
"That's no owl," Grace whispered.
"You're right, he's a Strix, which means he’s got four wings and venom." I leaned forward. "They're Roman, and commonly associated with poison magi."
"An astute assessment to be sure, Miss Hopewell. Hmm, perhaps I've gotten that wrong. It's Miss Morgenstern, yes?" An accompanying basso laugh rumbled like rocks falling. "And you've made one incorrect assumption."
I looked up to find Luciano towering over us. My mouth hung open, and I wasn’t alone. We all sat there gawking like a nest full of baby birds.
He’d caught us talking about him and was now throwing insults like a student instead of a teacher. And Dylan had thought an owlish familiar was a horrible stereotype.
“Male Strixes have triangular tufts.” He gestured at his familiar’s head, drawing our attention to the rounded feathers at the crown, chuckling softly. “As you can see, my companion is female.”
"Peep?" Ember fluttered to my other shoulder, craning her neck to get a better look, as if she also wanted to learn about the sexual dimorphism of magical creatures.
"Hoo." The Strix blinked. She was either sleepy or thought dragonets were no big deal. Probably the latter since she didn't bother yawning.
The only course of action was my fallback: what would Bubbe do?
"Well, thanks for the instruction, Professor." I stood carefully so Ember didn't get too unbalanced. "You might already know that I'm Noah Morgenstern's sister, Aliyah. It's good to me
et you."
Behind the smile I showed, it felt like being encased in ice because for me, fear was paralyzingly glacial. Professor Luciano walking up like that, despite the chuckle, had me stone-cold scared—which was why I extended my hand anyway.
"It might be nice to meet you, too." The professor didn't shake my hand, only stood there gazing at each of us in turn. "However, I see one of your cohorts is lacking a familiar. Can you tell me why that is, Miss Morgenstern?"
"Well, that's not my story to tell." I looked at Dylan, who'd gone completely still. He’d asked us not to repeat his story. There was no choice but to introduce him, but I managed to give him an out. "This is Dylan Khan. He's from London."
"Customs, Professor." He stood, brushing crumbs off his hands. "You must be aware of how difficult it is to get a magical creature over here on a student visa. I waited instead of seeking one out at home."
"Fortunately, not a matter of concern with an instructor's visa, to be sure." Luciano inclined his head. "And no issue for Miss Dubois and her moon hare."
"I've got dual citizenship, Professor." She cuddled Lune, who was clearly not comfortable under the Strix's gaze. "It’s not difficult for me."
"All the same, Mister Khan. I'm sure you're aware that if you have no familiar at the start of your second month here, you'll need to change your focus from Familiar Studies to Preparatory Academia."
Dylan nodded, staring down at his shoes. I would have too, in his place because only a handful of students ever ended up in Preparatory Academia. The only reason they even had an alternate course of study was that someone in the inaugural class had lost their familiar in an accident halfway through their first year.
Hawthorn Academy was all about familiars. It'd suck for Dylan if he didn’t find one. As far as I knew, my mom was the only person who’d ever enrolled in Preparatory Academia voluntarily.
"Oi, Lucy. Let them off the hook for now, yeah?" Professor DeBeer came to the rescue. She flipped a long lock of hair off her shoulder, revealing a leather pauldron strapped to it. I wondered why until her familiar fluttered down from a rafter. It was a long-legged bird with stark black and white plumage, one I didn't immediately recognize.
